Enfilade

From Bloomsbury:

Ludmilla Jordanova and Florence Grant, eds., Where Words and Images Meet (London: Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 2024), 248 pages, ISBN: 978-1350300569 (hardback), $120 / ISBN: ‎978-1350300552 (paperback), $40.

From 19th-century frontispieces to Soviet photo albums, from the relationships between portraits and biographies to museum labels, the book’s richly illustrated chapters open up historically specific connections between word and image to collective examination and fruitful analysis. Written by both established and emerging scholars in a range of interrelated fields, the chapters deliberately foreground previously overlooked topics as well as unfamiliar disciplinary approaches, to offer a stimulating and carefully developed framework for looking at these ubiquitous phenomena afresh. Where Words and Images Meet opens up for analysis and reflection the forms of attention, practices, skills and assumptions that underlie visual interpretation and meaning-making in the writing of history. By bringing the features of the materials we read and look at into focus, we can grasp more effectively the complex interrelationships involved, and enhance our practice and understanding.

Ludmilla Jordanova is Emeritus Professor of History and Visual Culture at Durham University. She is also the author of History in Practice, 3rd Edition (Bloomsbury, 2019).
Florence Grant holds a PhD in History from King’s College London and is currently an independent writer and editor based in Western North Carolina.

c o n t e n t s

List of Plates
List of Illustrations
List of Contributors
Preface and Acknowledgements

Introduction

Part I | Identifying with Books
Discussion
1  Fronts Matter: The Role of the Authorial Frontispiece in Germaine de Staël’s Corinne: or, Italy — Seren Nolan, Durham University
2  Othering the Ex-Libris: Israel Solomons (1860–1923) and the Invention of the Jewish Bookplate — Tom Stammers, Durham University
Bridge

Part II | Representing Authority
Discussion
3  Picturing Criminal Law in Old Regime France: Brunel, Known as Bétancourt, Being Led to the Scaffold (1670) — Tom Hamilton, Durham University
4  Word and Image in Popular Science— Joseph D. Martin, Durham University
Bridge

Part III | Order and Disorder
Discussion
5  Museum Labels: Word and Object on Display — Lola Sánchez-Jáuregui, University of Glasgow
6  Play with Literacy in Edward Lear’s Nonsense Alphabets — A. Robin Hoffman, Art Institute of Chicago
Bridge

Part IV | Authenticity and Interpretation
Discussion
7  On Taking Artists at Their Word: Artists’ Writings and Statements from 1850 to the Present — Lucy Whelan, University of Cambridge
8  Portraiture and Biography: Harmonious Marriage or Difficult Relationship? — Ludmilla Jordanova, Durham University
Bridge

Part V | Making, Compiling, Arranging
Discussion
9  Extra-Illustration in Early Twentieth-Century England — Ludmilla Jordanova, Durham University
10  Beyond the Caption: Words and Images in an Interwar Soviet Amateur Photograph Album — Antonia Miejluk, Durham University
Bridge

Part VI | Words in the Visual Field
Discussion
11  Word as Image: The Verbal in the Photograph — J. J. Long, Durham University
12  Text-Image Hybridity in Know Thyself and Early Modern English Print — Finola Finn, Independent Scholar, Germany
Bridge

Afterword: Word, Image, and Play

Bibliography
Index